MusicMaster Blog

By Drew Bennett

Today, it’s tough to juggle everything you need to juggle at the station.  Even the music department can be something you explore to find ways of saving time.  One of those ways is to build reports and run them against a log you scheduled to make sure everything looks good before sending it on to automation.  In today’s tip, I’m going to talk about the reports you should run before sending any music log to air.

1. Artist Turnover/Artist Separation Report

The worst mistake you can make on a music log is scheduling an artist too close to itself.  It can depend largely on format, who that artist is and how many songs you might play from that artist but hearing a song from them and then hearing another song two songs later is just bad scheduling.  However, we’re all guilty of this at one time or another and there’s an easy way to avoid it.  Build an Artist Keyword Separation report in your music scheduler and run it against each day you schedule.  Sort the report by least separated artist keywords and make sure nothing is showing up as playing too close to itself.  If you catch one or two, you can fix them then rather than finding them in a live log.

2. Title Turnover Report

Every station has songs that are super testers.  Those songs need to evenly place throughout the day.  You may play them twice or three times per day but you need them to evenly place throughout the day.  You have a couple of choices on reports you might run.  You can run an Individual Songs report that shows every song scheduled for the time period.  You can highlight a song in the report and check its placement to make sure it’s even through the day or the time period.  You could also run the same report but filter it to include only the titles you know you need to see.  Make sure you best testing songs place evenly throughout the log.

3. Attribute Airplay Density Report

The general sound of the station I program right now boils down to two codes: Pop and Rock.  I have sub-codes that I use for special situations, too.  I run a report every day that checks the airplay density of these codes.  You should, too.  These reports tell you how “rock” the day was or maybe how “country” or “pop” or whatever code is important to your database.  In many cases, density reports can give you clues to how the station generally sounded during off-rated months or months where you saw growth.  At the very least you can check the frequency of sound codes or other attributes and make some adjustments in your inventory.

There are other reports that you will run weekly like a Weekly Spins Report or Category Usage reports that may come in handy on occasion.  These three reports should be run every day.  They can help you keep a good tab on the data and identify issues in a music log without spending copious amounts of time scrolling through a log and picking out issues on your own.  Do you have a list of reports or diagnostics that you like to run on a daily basis?  Let me know about them!  Happy Scheduling!